SUPERMAN may have been a creation of the 1930s but his is a myth for our times. And the power of the fictional hero’s story has only been underlined by the heroic life and tragic death of his Hollywood incarnation, Christopher Reeve.
The potency of the Superman myth lies in the perennial human yearning to escape the constraints of the human condition. To be human is to inhabit a world of vulnerability and limits. The weakness of flesh, and its end in death, frame all human endeavour. Human virtues, certainly as most moral thinkers have understood them, are responses to the fraught nature of our existence. Courage comes from meeting danger, justice lies in mastering wickedness, love itself is an attempt to rescue ourselves and others from solitude and selfishness.
Superman appeals as an idea, and has survived as a character, because he transcends these limitations. The Man of Steel is invulnerable to the decay and damage that flesh sustains, impervious to bullets, unconstrained by the natural laws of gravity or time. But even though he operates in a realm where the laws of nature, and therefore the hardships that shape virtue, no longer apply, Superman serves a moral purpose. He is a deus ex machina, both supernatural and mechanistic, setting this world to rights through his technologically advanced powers, relieving suffering and injustice by means of his X-ray vision and speed-of-light flight. Superman fills the void apparently left by the unwillingness of God to intervene in human affairs, ensuring that evil will not triumph in this world.
The contrast between the myth of Superman, the sheer potency of this fictional creation, and the eventual fate of Christopher Reeve is inescapably poignant. The actor who played a figure capable of transcending human weakness was, horrifically, trapped by the frailty of his own body. An accident sustained while enjoying his own athletic prowess reduced him to a paralysed state. He became the prisoner of flesh that would no longer respond to his own, indomitable, spirit. Reeve refused to accept his fate and, in his response to the constraints that life imposed on him, he displayed signal virtues. He met pain with stoicism, refused to despair and used his still powerful mind to campaign for more effective research into his plight.
The research in which Reeve reposed the greatest hope was the development of cures for all manner of conditions from experimentation on stem cells. These cells, which exist in embryos and also in adults, notably in the umbilical cord and in bone marrow, are particularly versatile building blocks of life. They have the potential to repair or regenerate damaged cells and tissue. Scientists have held out the prospect of cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease and diabetes through their use.
Reeve himself believed that if embryonic stem-cell research had not been impeded by the Bush Administration, then a cure might have been found for his condition in his lifetime. Most scientists doubt very much if that would ever have been the case. But the impression lingers in many minds that the Bush Administration, and others who harbour doubts about embryonic stem-cell research, inhabit a medieval moral universe where outdated religious doctrine prevents science relieving suffering. Reeve compared opposition to embryonic stem-cell research with the attitude of Jehovah’s Witnesses objecting to blood transfusions. And the depiction of President Bush as a prisoner of “the religious Right” certainly plays to the prejudiced impression of an Administration mired in obscurantism.
Scepticism towards embryonic stem-cell research is not, however, evidence of moral impoverishment and lack of imagination. Quite the opposite.
Embryonic stem-cell experimentation necessarily involves not just the destruction of human life but the creation of life with the specific intent to destroy it. Such destruction is justified on the utilitarian basis that a greater good accrues to society as a whole through the sacrifice of lives less useful.
It is widely accepted in today’s Britain that embryos, certainly at the early stages of development, are not entitled to the protection that we afford other human life. But it doesn’t take a huge leap of moral imagination to recognise that it is only time, and not any other ethical divide, that separates them from us. And once we engage morally with the dignity due to innocent life we can understand why it is particularly troubling to turn something recognisably human into a quarry of genetic material to be dispensed with, without ceremony, after its utility to others is at an end.
Once we turn human life into a means rather than an end, an object not a subject, a toolbox rather than a daughter, we diminish what it is to be human. More than that, the appetite, fed by some advocates of biotechnology, to liberate man from Nature also takes us down another morally fraught path.
For some scientists the promise inherent in stem-cell research, the cloning of human embryos and the whole burgeoning field of biotechnology, is the prospect of remaking man. The frailties that make up the human condition can, progressively, be eliminated by the manipulation of life’s building blocks. Not just life-threatening disease, but all manner of infirmities and imperfections can, potentially, be engineered out of existence. The prospect, if not of Superman, certainly of superior models of man, beckons. The comic- book myth of transcending human constraints has become a modern scientific aspiration.
Before we applaud such ambition, however, can we pause to consider what that would mean for humanity? Have we not learnt from those in the past century who wished to remake man, and saw in the lure of genetics the chance to create their own superman? I fear that once we trample over respect for the vulnerable and voiceless in our desire to eliminate frailty, we no longer make weakness our enemy, but make enemies of the weak.
michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk
Join the Debate at comment@thetimes.co.uk
